


Reversions, or to slake the bitter thirst on hyssop red

by midrashic



Series: Returns, or love's hourly sacraments [2]
Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Dark Charles Xavier, M/M, Pre-Slash, Role Reversal, X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-02
Updated: 2020-06-02
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:40:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24313681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midrashic/pseuds/midrashic
Summary: Charles finds redemption, or some future like it.
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier
Series: Returns, or love's hourly sacraments [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1734958
Comments: 42
Kudos: 73
Collections: Cherik Week 2020





	Reversions, or to slake the bitter thirst on hyssop red

**Author's Note:**

> In some worlds, "Reversings"!Charles Xavier carries on his path of destruction and death. This is a look into a universe where he doesn't.

i. ends

Charles feels it the moment that the jagged shard of what had once been the Blackbird spears through Erik’s armor into his side.

When Charles had come to him, long ago, when this Sentinel business had first started getting bad, and Erik had taken off the helmet, he’d thought, in spite of the state of the world, in spite of the report that had just come in, that had sparked this parley, of mutant children between the ages of four and fifteen—known to be the Brotherhood’s prime recruiting demographic—being rounded up and forced into camps, in spite of it all, that he couldn’t remember ever being happier, as he spread his tendrils across Erik’s consciousness, as he crept down beneath the surface thoughts and entwined himself with that beautiful mind, the most beautiful he’d ever come across. At last, at last he was welcome in Erik’s mind again, and if he had not cried with joy, it was only because years as the Brotherhood’s enigmatic leader had taught him to conceal his emotions, even from himself.

Much later, when they’d found their way back to each other’s beds, Charles had confessed the way not being able to touch Erik’s mind—how winding himself through the minds of politicians, of lobbyists, of his servants and soldiers, but never the mind he wanted most to bury himself in, to lose himself in the music of—had eaten at him over the years, left him feeling hollow and moth-infested, like something had nibbled on his soul until it was an unappetizing meal for love or any higher passion. Erik had said nothing, only turned his head close to kiss Charles’s ear and murmur, “You know… it won’t always be pleasant, right? Being in my mind.”

Charles had already been introduced to Erik’s nightmares, many of which featured _him,_ and he’d scoffed softly. Surely if he could withstand Erik imagining Charles ordering his execution with cold, unfeeling eyes, he could take anything Erik’s mind could throw at him.

“I mean,” Erik had said, “you’ll be there when I die,” and Charles had hushed him and kissed him silent, because he would ensure that wasn’t a concern. Because he had always meant to go first.

But Charles can’t battle the Sentinels.

Couldn’t even if he’d been able to walk; his mutation’s not built for it, not the way Erik’s is. So instead he fists his hands against his unfeeling thighs in the crypt as Rogue and Kitty flinch at every thud of Sentinel armor against the walls of the structure, at every battle cry that echoes outside and into their bones. Charles watches through Erik’s eyes as he flings the plane, as Storm, his last and best surviving lieutenant, flings lightning into Hank’s energy-core, as shrapnel goes flying everywhere, taking out Sentinels, smashing through the mechanisms of the Sentinel carriers—the others duck—Erik throws up his hands and stops the shrapnel hanging in midair.

But he doesn’t feel with his metal-sense the piece, mainly plastic, from the Blackbird’s control panel until it pierces him through, until it slashes him open. He doesn’t feel it until he _feels_ it, and then, oh, he feels it. He gasps and reaches and tugs it out and Charles—

Charles _screams_ , because he can already feel the damaged ligaments, the torn muscle and organ tissue, is mute witness as Erik grimly catalogues the shape of his pain and makes a diagnosis. He won’t survive the hour. Blood gushes from the wound and instead of putting pressure on it, he glances up, hunting for Sentinels, and Storm, staring at him, horrorstruck, fully aware of what his death will herald, is not paying attention when a Sentinel rises up and catches her in its sticky, rotten-honey claws.

Erik doesn’t reach for her. She’s already lost. Instead, he clenches his fist and metal _flies_ to him, all the debris of the explosion he and Storm had created together, and it seals itself over the doors and walls, over the crypt’s weak points, entombing them inside. _Erik!_ Charles cries out, feeling frantically the shape of Erik’s resolve, the way he has calmly planned the next twenty minutes out with his well-honed tactician’s mind, and knows that after that it will be up to them, this motley group of Charles’s soldiers and Erik’s protegees, to keep Charles and Kitty and Logan safe. _Erik, no, come back, we’ll take care of you, we’ll keep you alive—_

 _You have bigger problems,_ Erik tells him gently, but when Blink opens a portal to the inside he goes, his step slow but not stumbling, the booms and thuds of battle drowning out the sound of his feet padding softly across the floor.

“Erik,” Charles says roughly, and reaches for him.

Kitty gasps when she sees the blood dripping down his side, almost lost in the black leather of his armor, but unmistakable, for anyone who’s been surviving in this brave new world as long as they have. Kitty Pryde, one of Erik’s little wards, not so little anymore, who is currently phasing Logan through the timestream; Rogue puts an arm around her, one of Charles’s child soldiers, not such a child anymore, having found love here at the end of the world. Her eyes darken with worry. She’s seen her fair share of death, with the Brotherhood and as a mutant in the Time of Sentinels, but she’s such a sensitive soul, it always affects her. “Don’t look, sugar,” she tells her, and Kitty nods and buries her face in Rogue’s leather-clad shoulder. Charles doesn’t have that luxury.

Erik slumps across from Charles’s chair, the faintest of smiles playing around his mouth. “I hope the us of forty years ago is having a better time than we are now,” he says.

Charles thinks of his younger self, at the way he’d cried, _“Then what was it all_ for?!” and laughs bitterly, brokenly, “I don’t think so, my old friend.”

“Ah, well,” Erik sighs. “Logan will whip them into shape, the way he has with all of your recruits for the last thirty-five years.”

“We’re not children,” Charles reminds him gently.

“Aren’t we?” Erik feels for his side and winces. “Ah, Charles. It hurts.”

Charles reaches for his hand, wraps it in his own. Wishes he could feel the heat of Erik through their matching gloves. “It’ll be okay,” he whispers. “I didn’t give you up for years to have it end like this.”

“Years and years,” Erik sighs dreamily. “Years and years of children squabbling…”

“All those years wasted fighting each other,” Charles murmurs. “To have a precious few of them back…”

Behind him, Kitty sways as the blood loss threatens to bring her into unconsciousness once again. Rogue bites her lip and tugs her glove off, offering her palm to Kitty. To take over at any moment. In this moment, Charles presses a kiss to Erik’s gloved knuckles. Erik chuckles. 

“To have a precious few of them back,” he repeats, and closes his eyes.

Charles has sacrificed everything he’s ever loved—his sister, his lover, his pride, his principles, the _future_ he’d craved with every fiber of his being with this man, this dying man whose hand is in his—and he hadn’t even gotten what he’d wanted, in the end. He’d given up his life with Erik and he hadn’t even saved mutantkind. It’s not fair. It’s not fair, he wants to cry, but Erik knows. Erik understands the unfairness of it even better than he does.

When Erik dies, he feels it.

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

ii. middles

At 9:45 AM on August 2, 1983, Erik sits down by the edge of the Capitol reflecting pool and removes his helmet. He balances it on his knee and waits. The sun is very high and very bright overhead; it casts his shadow into the water. He looks mildly at the families passing by who give him curious looks back, at the DC staffers on their way to another long day in the maw of hell. He doesn’t pull out a book or look to backup stationed throughout the National Mall, if there is any. He just sits. And waits.

At 3:12 PM on August 2, 1983, everyone stops moving except for Erik.

Erik doesn’t react. He doesn’t put on the helmet. He continues to wait, sadly eyeing the little girl mid-lick of ice cream, which will surely melt before this meeting is done. He knows what Charles is doing; scanning the minds of those around him for subterfuge, for hidden backup, for a trick, a trap. But traps have never really been Erik’s style. He’ll only find one mutant mind out of place anyway, and that will be enough for him to risk it.

At 3:14 on August 2, 1983, the slight scrape of wheelchair rims on stone causes Erik to tilt his head toward the sound. It is almost as though Charles materializes into being, the way he sheds the persona of a hapless tourist and becomes Charles Xavier, leader of the Brotherhood of Mutants. He looks good, as always. His hair is shorter than Erik remembers it being, when Charles had rescued him from William Stryker’s test facility years ago, but combed neatly; he’s wearing an elegant dark blue suit, pinstriped, in the modern style. “Erik,” he says, and he doesn’t sound wary. He sounds warm, welcoming, like any man embracing an old friend. “This is a novel way to let me know you’d like to chat.”

“I needed to see _you_ ,” Erik says. The usual way of communicating through Storm, one of Charles’s lieutenants, can’t cut it anymore. Not with what his visitor has told him.

“And you knew I couldn’t resist the allure of your face unobscured by that godawful helmet,” Charles teases lightly. Erik doesn’t smile, but something around his eyes lightens a bit. “You’re not worried I’ll take control of your mind? Sway you to my side and make you my own?”

“I’m never worried about that, Charles,” Erik says, and Charles almost believes it. Almost.

“No backup?”

“No backup per se,” Erik hedges.

Instead of frowning, Charles smiles, but there’s a coldness to it now, a coldness Erik hates but remembers all too well. “Who is your friend, then?” Charles asks, and with a tap of his fingers against his temples Logan is stiffly walking out from where he was leaning against a pillar. Erik knows that Charles can make a man’s gait smooth and unaffected; he wants Logan conscious for this, to know that his body is obeying a will not his own. It’s cruel, but hardly unexpected from this dark-eyed, unflinching shadow in Charles Xavier’s body. “Ah,” Charles says, “I think I remember you. Erik give you an incentive to join the cause that merited something other than a ‘Fuck you,’ then?”

“No,” Logan says. “You did.”

That startles Charles. He looks deeper into Logan’s eyes, and Logan lets him in, tilts his head back and welcomes the invasive probe of telepathy he sends into Logan’s consciousness, not caring for gentleness. Charles stares for a moment, then reels back, laughing. “What telepath did you convince to implant _those_ memories?” he gasps, but something icier than mirth is in his voice. “A time traveler? Really, Erik. Surely you can do better than that.”

“I would not,” Erik says, matching Charles’s coldness with his own, “try to trick you by imagining the future that Logan’s told us about. I’ve had enough genocide for a lifetime.”

That shuts Charles up. At last, at last. All Erik has ever wanted to do for the last twenty years is just _shut Charles up._

“In five days,” Logan says, brisk and businesslike, “you’re gonna kill a man named Bolivar Trask.” Charles goes still. Erik watches him carefully, knows that he keeps his own council, that this may not be something he’s told anyone, not even his most trusted lieutenants. “It won’t be the first, but it’ll be the most important. His death, right as he’s talking to governments about the ‘mutant threat’—it turns him from a crackpot into a martyr. He’s already started building machines to exterminate us. Over the next forty years, they succeed.”

“As far as I understand it,” Erik says, “our future selves projected Logan’s mind back into his body. He came to me to find a way to get to you.” He smiles awkwardly. “It seems you’re a hard man to find, even for someone who’s on your side.”

“On my side,” Charles says blankly.

“In a coupla years, you’ll save me from a research lab,” Logan explains. “I’ll join you. Be your attack dog. Train the kiddies. I’m good with kids. And I believe in what you’re doing. But it doesn’t stop the prison camps. The Sentinels. The inhibitor collars. The walls, the border closings, the end of the fucking world. Only you can do that, Charles. Here. Now.”

Charles looks past Logan as though he’s not even there. He looks straight into Erik’s eyes, as though he’s combing through that gaze for understanding, or maybe hope. “You have no _idea_ what Bolivar Trask has done.”

“I do,” Erik says softly. “You’re not the only one who’s lost people. But if killing him leads to the extinction of our kind—no. I thought the ends justified the means, Charles. Letting a monster go so that our kind can survive, can flourish—this should be easy for you.” He looks at Charles with keen eyes, with sympathy writ large on his face. “Who did you lose?”

“You don’t know me as well as you think you do,” Charles snaps.

“But you do,” Logan says. “Look into my mind, Charles. There’s someone there who might be able to convince you.”

Charles hesitates for a long moment. Erik watches him carefully. He knows—this is absurd. This is the most absurd thing he has ever asked of Charles; Charles was always the one who wanted the moon on a silver platter, and Erik the pragmatist between them. He looks lost, and it makes him look young. Young in a way he has not been since the beach in Cuba, since his faith in the essential goodness of humanity was shaken so badly he was transformed into what he is today. “Go on,” Erik says softly. “I did, with Emma’s help.”

Charles’s eyes slowly drift to Logan’s. He places a hand to his temple, an old affectation that makes rusty fondness surge up through Erik’s veins. And he lets himself sink into Logan’s mind.

— ⓧ —

He opens his eyes in a room. Molten light gilds his hands, turns dust and ash into gold. He sits up, and then, hesitantly—proof he’s on the astral plane—slides until he’s sitting on the edge of a stone slab. In dreams, he can walk.

He looks to his right; a young, square-faced woman is being supported by another with white streaks in her hair. Energy like jellyfish legs floats between her hands where Charles’s head had lain. He looks around. The architecture suggests China, but a ruined China that seems out of place both with the gleaming metropolises of today and the artifacts of the past; a recent trauma, an earthquake or other disaster, that knocked one of those gleaming artificial towers down. There is an old man in—

—a wheelchair.

And behind him, flanking him, is another man, standing, in black leather armor and the cape that Erik so favors, with steel-gray hair and unmistakable features. “Erik,” he breathes, soaking in the image of Erik forty years from now—still handsome, but that handsomeness deepened into something harder, something sterner and more controlled. At his voice, the old man in the wheelchair—bald, Charles notes with dismay, thinking of his own slightly-thinning hair—turns to him, slowly, slowly.

“Charles,” the man croaks out.

In spite of himself, Charles smiles. “Charles,” he says, fully convinced in spite of himself, savoring the taste of something new, something _extraordinary_ , on his tongue. He stands and crosses over to the man in the wheelchair, who is smiling at him. There’s a softness that Charles associates with the man, a softness he has not felt in a very long time. “What happened here?” he asks.

“Happened. Is happening. Will be happening,” Old Charles says. “A battle. Many battles. Mutants and anyone carrying the X-gene fighting for their lives against the Sentinels. And the aftermath of battles; looting, abandonment, mass hysteria.” He glances around, at the dragon-shaped rafters, at the scarred and pitted wood of the ceiling. “I confess that I haven’t been here long. Kitty and Rogue and their cohort are the ones who found it. But the whole world is full of places like this, Charles. Places you and I failed to protect.”

Charles swallows. Something hot like bile is burning in the back of his throat. “How?” he demands. “How do we stop it?”

“You know how,” Old Charles says, almost gently.

Charles bristles at it. He doesn’t need to be _coddled,_ damn it, he’s a terrorist and a tactical mastermind. “You can’t be serious. Bolivar Trask—”

“It’s not about Bolivar Trask, Charles,” Old Charles cries out, suddenly losing his composure. “It’s about all of it. The path you’re on. The path that will kill you and everyone you love. I’m your Ghost of Christmas Future, Charles, and I’m telling you: what you give up, your hope, your humanity, _Erik_ — _it isn’t worth it._ You don’t save them. You can’t protect them. All you do is rob yourself of the few years of happiness you were given.”

Charles clenches his fists. He can feel horror churn in him, his head pounding sickly, he can feel, to his disbelief, tears begin to well. “Then—what was it all _for?!”_ he cries out, and he is shaking, he is bereft. Slowly, like picking at a scab, the layers of defense he has had wrapped around his mind for so long, the desperate justifications, the obscene calculations, start to peel away, until there is only Charles left, waiting and found wanting, and so desperately, horribly alone.

Old Charles doesn’t answer, but in this space of mind-to-mind, Charles can hear his reply: _Nothing._

When the tears come, they are hot as mercury on his cheeks.

— ⓧ —

When Charles resurfaces from Logan’s mind, he looks dazed. At some point, tears started coursing down his cheeks. “I—” he says, and stops, looking from Logan to Erik, seeming deeply discomfited. Without conscious thought, Erik is at once kneeling beside him, and wiping Charles’s tears away. He seems surprised to find himself crying. Their hands meet, brushing wetness from his face.

“My… older self,” Charles says roughly, “…he told me the plan.”

“It’s a good one,” Erik admits. He’s learned to be wary of Charles’s schemes, but this is benign, as far as it goes, and it will buy them crucial years of safety. Logan watches them for a second, then nods, satisfied as what he sees, not surprised at all by the way Charles and Erik’s fingers have tangled together. “We’d better summon the troops.”

Charles nods sharply—this, at least, he knows how to do—and presses two fingers to his temple. Shaken, he reverts back to old habits, Erik thinks, his heart tender and bruised with Charles’s pain. “Storm,” he says aloud, for Erik and Logan’s benefit, “summon the high-ranking members of the Brotherhood. We’ll need everyone.”

So it is a united force—X-Men, Brotherhood, and one time-traveler—who shows up in future President Walter Mondale’s bedroom in the heart of the night. He starts awake, his eyes darting between the people who have packed themselves into his room courtesy of Azazel and Kurt, his eyes returning again and again to those with visible mutations—Raven, Hank, Logan with his claws out. At the foot of his bed, Charles sits, Erik at his flank, his arms crossed. “Mr. Mondale,” he says. His voice still seems rubbed-raw with crying from him, but he knows from where he’s threaded through Mondale’s mind that he seems smooth as glass, as threatening as a gun pointed straight at him. “You know who I am.”

“Y-you’re Charles Xavier,” Mondale stutters. “Leader of t-the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. And you—” he turns a pleading gaze on Erik, who has his helmet off, and his face falls. Charles can see the workings behind his eyes, the assumption that Erik the hero, Erik the X-Man, has fallen to the Brotherhood. “Please—don’t do this—”

“Not today, Mr. Mondale,” Charles says pleasantly. “Today I’m just a mutant. And I’m here as a courtesy, with my fellow mutants.”

“You’re a powerful political figure,” Erik says. “Soon to be even more powerful.” Mondale’s eyes light up—he can hardly miss Erik’s meaning. “So we figured we’d give you a gift.”

Mondale flinches away. “No—please—I’ve never done anything to hurt your kind—”

“You’ve never done anything to protect us, either,” Logan growls.

Hank comes forward. Mondale stares at him, transfixed. Hank’s gaze is down—he hadn’t wanted to be in Beast form for this, but Erik had convinced him—he holds out, with his claws, a simple device, just a screen mounted on a metal box roughly the size of a VCR tape. Mondale takes it, shaking. Charles can see through his eyes—on the screen right now, a constellation of lights, as many as there are mutants in the room. “What is this?” he says shakily.

“A reminder,” Charles says. “That the people you hurt can show up in unexpected places.”

He signals. Azazel puts his hand on Charles’s shoulder; the rest of the mutants in the room, mere props, really, hold hands. And with a blink, they’re gone, back in Westchester, in the X-Men’s underground base. But Charles’s mind is still wound through Mondale’s; he sees him flinch back as they vanish in a swirl of colored smoke, the way his heart is still pounding double-time as he stares at his suddenly empty room, the way he pinches himself and winces at the proof that it’s not a dream, the reality stinging so much harsher than the pain of it. Charles watches through Mondale’s eyes as a single bright speck approaches the center of the monitor; when Mondale notices it, he flinches. But a knock on the door.

“Dad?” his daughter Eleanor’s voice sounds out. “Did I hear someone talking?”

Mondale stares at the monitor in dawning comprehension. Charles closes his eyes, and when he opens them, it’s to Hank saying, “I don’t like this, but okay. The former vice president now thinks that his daughter’s a mutant.” He sets down the handset from which he was controlling the display. “And is now in possession of a device that will track mutants accurately 99% of the time, unless someone is actively messing with the controls. Has anyone thought about how this could backfire?”

“Chuck has, I’m sure,” Logan says with amusement. “And he thought this was our best bet anyway.”

“I’ll keep an eye on him,” Charles says wearily. “Make sure he doesn’t use it for nefarious ends.”

“Are we listening to this?” Hank demands. “Why wouldn’t he just—take over Mondale’s mind if he really is going to be the next President? Why is he going along with this at all?”

“Telepathic interference detectors are going to be invented in the next decade,” Logan reports. “Largely thanks to this one’s shenanigans.” He pats Charles on the shoulder. Charles flinches. “Better to let him come to these conclusions on his own.”

The conversation moves on, but Charles is barely aware of it. He stares into space, thinking about the operations he’s going to have to shut down. He won’t kill Bolivar Trask, but, as his future self had pointed out, if he keeps killing, he might well create the same situation years later. So he has to shut down the Brotherhood, rededicate himself to legal forms of action. He has to behave… as an X-Man would. Freeing mutants from facilities, but not burning them to the ground. Speaking at rallies, protecting humans from wayward mutants. _Lobbying._

He wonders how the world will react, without the Brotherhood to hate and fear. If maybe he’d been wrong all this time. The world never needed a villain. Only he did.

Erik puts his hand on the handle of his wheelchair. “Come on,” he says gently. “Let’s get out of here.”

— ⓧ — ⓧ — ⓧ —

iii. beginnings

He’s been at the mansion for a week when the girl comes to find him.

She’s small, seven or eight—she would have been perhaps four the last time he visited the mansion, and he doesn’t blame the others for keeping her well-hidden, out of sight entirely, though her gift—speaking to animals—is not one that he would normally have gone out of his way to recruit. She peeks at him from around the corner. A swallow is perched on her shoulder. “Hullo,” she says shyly.

He smiles at her. The X-Men wouldn’t approve of him talking to any of their children, except maybe Erik, but he misses them. Children. “Hello.”

He wonders whose child she is; unlike Charles, who collected children of all backgrounds and familial statuses, the X-Mansion is first and foremost a base for the X-Men, with any children here having ties to the X-Men in some way: Erik’s ward, Alex’s son. “I’m Nina,” she says, coming forward. “This is Marigold.”

“Hello, Marigold,” he says, smiling at the swallow.

“Are you staying here now?” Nina says curiously. “Did the X-Men rescue you? Did you get hurt? Is that why you’re in a wheelchair? Papa says the X-Men rescue a lot of people, but none of them ever come to stay unless they join them. Are you joining the X-Men?”

Charles Xavier, an X-Man. He wants to laugh. “I can’t fight, my dear,” he says gently.

“That’s okay. Neither does Uncle Hank. Papa says fighting is only half of what the X-Men do. I want to be an X-Man when I grow up, but Papa says I have to go to _school_ and _college_ and _try having a real life_ first and I don’t want a real life. But Scott says my power’s not useful.”

“I’m sure that’s not true,” Charles says gently, though he’d just been thinking it. “All mutation is beautiful.”

“Thanks. Marigold says thanks too. She says that if I didn’t have my powers we’d never be friends, and that would be sad. Do you like stuffed animals? All the adults are having an X-Men meeting and the others are too old for me to play with.”

“I love stuffed animals,” Charles says warmly. Nina beams and brings out a stuffed rabbit with button eyes. “Her name is Brownie, because she’s brown,” she tells him seriously. “And she doesn’t come with a name, not like the real animals, so Papa said I could give her a name.”

“She’s lovely,” Charles says. The rabbit is obviously handmade, but the stitching is neat and careful, and the fabric she’s made from has a lovely nap to it that makes one itch to run their hands over her. “Are you going on an adventure with her?”

“We’re already on an adventure. My toy dragon Greenie is missing and I think he’s been kidnapped.”

He knows what the others think of him, him and his child soldiers. He knows they remember their own training with him and cringe at the thought of children in his care. But Ororo and the others were once little children, and he played with them. He’s good with children, whether the X-Men believe it or not. So he smiles and says, “There are all sorts of hiding places in this house, and I know all the best ones. Shall we look for Greenie together?” and she nods enthusiastically and smiles brilliantly in a way that reminds Charles of—someone—and Charles shows her the loose floorboards and the sliding windows that he still remembers, and she shows him where the construction for the elevator shaft and the lower levels have opened up new spaces to play in, and they’re pondering how to get Charles up the attic stairs when someone calls up to them.

“Mausi?”

“Papa!” Nina calls out, and flies back down the stairs to land in—

Erik’s arms.

Charles’s stomach plummets and he’s not even sure why.

(But he knows why; oh, how he knows why. He is bombarded, all at once, with images of Erik and Nina—Erik kissing a pregnant woman’s belly, Erik enraptured holding Nina in his arms for the first time, Erik smiling and nodding as she chatters on to squirrels and birds, Erik braiding her hair in the neat little paired braids she’s wearing now, Erik reading to her, Erik kissing her goodnight, Erik singing her a lullaby, that lovely voice that Charles himself has only heard in snatches, Erik humming after a jog, Erik murmuring lowly to himself in the shower, Erik smoking in bed—and the falling sensation is the realization that he has missed an entire life, and missed _his chance_ at being in that life. He wonders who Nina’s mother is, Raven or Emma or that new X-Man, what’s her name, Guthrie. He wonders if it matters at all.)

“Is your meeting over?” Nina asks brightly.

Erik kisses her temple. “Yes, the meeting’s over,” he says. “What are you doing up here?”

“Looking for Greenie! Charles was helping me.”

To his credit, Erik only freezes for a second, his fingers only tighten on Nina’s shoulders for a bare fraction of a moment, and if Charles didn’t know Erik so well (all that knowledge wasted) he would think that he hadn’t flinched at all to think of Charles and his child together. “Did you find him?” he asks.

“No,” Nina pouts.

“Did you enjoy looking, at least?”

“Yes! Charles knows _so many_ hiding places!”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Erik says. “This used to be his house, you know.”

Nina goggles. “I thought it was the X-Men’s house!”

“There weren’t X-Men until Charles and I made them up,” Erik says, and Charles starts to be included, but… he supposes Erik was right, that the little contingent of mutants they took to Cuba was the first iteration of the X-Men. “Will you let Charles and me talk? I think I saw Greenie hiding under your bed, along with a lot of dust bunnies.”

Nina makes a face. “I don’t like dust bunnies. They don’t talk like real bunnies.”

“I know, Mausi,” Erik says fondly, and presses another kiss to her forehead. Nina giggles. Charles looks away. “Go, scamper away. I’ll come find you.”

“Bye, Papa,” she says cheerfully, “bye, Charles,” and she’s gone.

Erik advances slowly up the next few steps. Charles holds up his hands, a calculated sign of harmlessness. “She came to find me,” he tells him. “Erik—I would never—”

“I know,” Erik says, and holds out his hand. Charles wheels closer and takes it hesitantly, feels the dry press of Erik’s skin against his. Erik leads him to a window, and together they watch the younglings play outside. Most of the Brotherhood had scattered when Charles disbanded them, but his children… they have nowhere to go. Storm— _Ororo_ , he supposes she is now—watches warily as Jean tries to teach her how to play basketball.

“She’s lovely,” Charles says, to take his mind off the pain of the reality that he has robbed Ororo of her childhood—for _nothing._

“Thank you,” Erik says warmly. “She’s my world. Her and Jean.”

Charles doesn’t ask about her mother. Instead, another question—equally damning—slips from his lips. “Erik,” he says, “Erik,” he tries roughly, “what am I doing here?”

“Hm?”

“Here, with your happy family and your children—” Charles struggles. Erik had extended the invitation, when the Brotherhood had fallen to pieces and Charles left sitting in the ruins with only himself and his ragged band of former children, and he had taken it, for lack of a better place to go, but he doesn’t know why he’s _here_ , he doesn’t know what Erik wants him to _do._ He is lost. He hasn’t gotten dressed properly in days. “With your righteous cause and your X-Men. What am I _doing_ here?”

“You belong here,” Erik says, as though it’s that simple. Maybe for him, it is. Charles lets out a bark of laughter.

“Maybe once,” he says, distant, sad. “Not anymore.”

“So where do you belong?” Erik asks, and that’s the rub. Nowhere. There is nowhere for something like him, a zealot who erred in his dogma and knows it. Perhaps support groups for the formerly religious. Erik places a hand on his shoulder, leans against the window casing. Sunlight dances off his features; he is beautiful as ever, as beautiful as he was on that Cuban beach, turning missiles into the water, into the sky. “It will take time, getting back their trust, finding your place, but I know you’ve learned how to be patient. This is your home, Charles. It always was. We’ve been waiting for you.”

“That’s a lie.”

“Fine,” Erik says, “ _I’ve_ been waiting for you,” and that. That is truth.

“I know,” Charles confesses. “It was a weakness of the X-Men’s I always exploited. The flaw in the heart of their leader.”

Erik turns to Charles, smiles. Draws a line over Charles’s sweatshirt, right over his heart. “There’s a matching flaw right here.”

Charles inclines his head. So there is. 

“Democratic candidate Mondale promised mutants a homeland,” Erik says abruptly. “That’s what the meeting was about. Whether or not we should take it.”

Charles hesitates. The world he always dreamed of was assimilationist, not separatist. It sets a dangerous precedents, shipping mutants off to somewhere else; raises the specter of the possibility that they _can_ all be shipped off somewhere else. But Erik knows that. Instead, Charles looks past his immediate reaction, as the leader of the Brotherhood of Mutants up until a week ago, and thinks about rest. Thinks about peace, from humans, from being feared and hated. About just _being._ “What did you decide?”

“That if we took it,” Erik says, “we’d give it to you.”

Charles freezes. “I. What?”

“None of us knows anything about running a government, Charles,” Erik says with warm amusement. “Not like you do. Oh, we have a couple of volunteers to make sure you don’t start up another mutant army, Hank and Alex who want to keep you in line. But I don’t think you’d need it. Would you?”

The plans, they spiral forth in Charles’s head like maps unrolling. Greenhouses, staffed by arbokinetics. Solar panels. Artisans. Self-sufficiency. Higher education; making the mutant homeland a destination for gifted young people of all species, human youngsters flocking to the mutants for an education in tolerance and diversity. Designing his own curriculum; once, in his more maudlin moments, he had dreamed about going with Erik on that beach, about building a school together out of the abandoned Xavier estate, though what Erik has done with it, turned it into a base of operations and a family home, is just as good, just as important.

Erik chuckles. “You’re already scheming, aren’t you?” he asks, and he doesn’t sound wary, he sounds fond.

Charles looks up at Erik, his eyes dazzled by the light of this possible future, and asks, “Why?”

“If anyone would make sure that it didn’t turn into a stronghold, cut off from the rest of the world, or a ghetto, a place to dump mutants without care, it would be you,” Erik says. “You would turn it into a haven. The very best of what it could be. I know how you cared for the people you rescued. How you turned them into an army, but also a society. Do you think you could do it again? Without the army, this time?”

“I’ll need help,” Charles whispers, barely daring to trust his own voice.

“Charles,” Erik says, his voice deep and sonorous with warmth, “all you ever had to do was _ask_ ,” and there, in the dormer window of his childhood home, Charles buries his face into his hands and cries, and Erik, by his side, shushes him, his head tipped against Charles’s shoulder, his scent redolent and lovely in Charles’s senses. Charles closes his eyes and thinks of a future, hesitantly, tentatively—not the one he had always pictured, but a better one. One where Erik is by his side. And weeps for it.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks again to [Librata](https://archiveofourown.org/users/librata/pseuds/librata), without whom this series would not exist. Fic and series title from "Two," by Helen Hunt Jackson. For Cherik Week 2020.
> 
> Rogue and Kitty are sending Logan back together in the Bad Timeline because I hate both of them with Bobby because Bobby is _gay._ Therefore Rogue and Kitty get to be gay too.
> 
> Scream with me at [tumblr](https://midrashic.tumblr.com/). If you like my work and want to support me, you can buy me a coffee. And join us on the [X-Men X-Traordinaire discord](https://discord.gg/m7Qx95n/).
> 
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